The Teaching of Jesus eBook

not so much in a sense of their own sin and guilt
and need, as rather in the consciousness of the glory
and honour of Christ. It is what they find within
themselves which brings some men to Christ; it is what
they find in Him which brings others. Some are
driven by the strong hands of stern necessity; some
are wooed by the sweet constraint of the sinless Son
of God. Some are crushed and broken and humbled
to the dust, and their first cry is “God be
merciful to me a sinner”; some when they hear
the call of Christ leap up to greet Him with a new
light in their eyes and the glad confession on their
lips, “Lord I will follow Thee whithersoever
Thou goest.”

What, then, shall we say to these things? What
but this, “There are diversities of workings,
but the same God, who worketh all things in all.”
Travellers to the same country do not always journey
by the same route; and for some of the heavenly pilgrims
the Slough of Despond lies on the other side of the
Wicket Gate. After all, it is of small moment
what brings a man forth from the City of Destruction;
enough if he have come out and if now his face is
set toward the city which hath the foundations, whose
builder and maker is God.

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CONCERNING PRAYER

“Who seeketh finds:
what shall be his relief
Who hath no power to seek,
no heart to pray,
No sense of God, but bears
as best he may,
A lonely incommunicable grief?
What shall he do? One
only thing he knows,
That his life flits a frail
uneasy spark
In the great vast of universal
dark,
And that the grave may not
be all repose.
Be still, sad soul! lift thou
no passionate cry,
But spread the desert of thy
being bare
To the full searching of the
All-seeing eye:
Wait—­and through
dark misgiving, blank despair,
God will come down in pity,
and fill the dry
Dead plain with light, and
life, and vernal air.”
J.C.
SHAIRP.

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CONCERNING PRAYER

“What man is there of you,
who, if his son shall ask him for a loaf, will
give him a stone; or if he shall ask for a fish, will
give him a serpent? If ye then, being evil, know
how to give good gifts unto your children, how
much more shall your Father which is in heaven
give good things to them that ask Him?”—­MATT.
vii. 9-11.

There has been in our day much painful disputation
concerning prayer and the laws of nature. Whole
volumes have been written to prove that it is possible,
or that it is impossible, for God to answer prayer.
I am not going to thresh out again this dry straw
just now. Discussions of this kind have, undoubtedly,
their place; indeed, whether we will or no, they are
often forced upon us by the conditions of the hour;
but they had no place in the teaching of Jesus, and
I do not propose to say anything about them now.
I wish rather, imitating as far as may be the gracious
simplicity and directness of the argument of Jesus
which we have just read, to gather up some of the
practical suggestions touching this great matter which
are strewn throughout the Gospels alike in the precepts
and practice of our Lord.